Category: Radio

MTR4B I was very fortunate to receive an early version of the LNR Precision MTR4B (Mountain Topper Radio) which is available in the UK & Europe fromDennis at Kanga UK. The MTRs are a pretty amazing family of radios and the MTR4B is a four band version that introduces 80m as standard along with simpler band […]

Satellites I finally put some effort into working out how to operate through satellites starting with the nice and easy FM sat, SO-50. I treated myself to an Arrow hand held 2m/70cm crossed yagi aerial and connected it up to a Yaesu VX-6 hand held which I pre-programmed using 7 discrete frequencies to receive the […]

Tripple SOTA activation in Snowdonia I’d been watching the weather forecast for most of March waiting for a few days of good weather to attempt a triple SOTA (Summits on the Air) activation in Snowdonia and, on 24th March 2017 I saw a gap in the weather that looked perfect for a flying visit. Accommodation […]

Straight key week came and went with almost no contacts this year. From the shack I used my lovely Marconi copy but the shack is often just a few degrees in temperature at this time of the year so I moved back indoors to operate from my bed! Operating the Air Ministry’s Type D on […]

It Summer vacation time so managed to squeeze in a couple of SOTA summits; Mynydd Carningli (GW/MW-033) in Wales. I hiked up from the waters edge in Parrog making this a half days activation. There’s very little space at the summit and a school outing had taken over when I arrived so I had to […]

Not a huge amount of radio going on this month although I did take the KX1 and a random wire with me to Italy and managed to work back to the UK…thanks G4XRV. I gave a presentation to the Reading & District Amateur Radio Club on promoting the hobby. The Reading Club has some really […]

This month I tweaked the tuning of my SOTA linked dipole to give me greater coverage on 40m. I now have an SWR of <1.7:1 across 20, 30 & 40m…now I’m ready for some Summer SOTA action :o) I’ve managed to achieved both my Worked all @lids (WALIDS) Bronze award and collected my first FISTS Millionaire […]

This month I rediscovered my Elecraft K1, a little gem of a radio and the first quality kit that genuinely gave me a fully featured and high performing CW transceiver. When I originally built it I had aerials for 80m & 20m so I built it to cover these two bands. Now I almost exclusively operate […]

Mountain Topper MTR3B review Propagation, which has been pretty poor all Summer, continues to thwart all attempts to play radio so I’ve started a bit of construction working on a Minima Transceiver as designed by Ashhar Farhan (VU2ESE). This is mainly thanks to Alex (G7KSE) who sent me a couple of swanky PCBs for this […]

My Icom IC7400 has developed a fault so it’s time to pack it up and get it shipped off to the menders. This has made a huge space on the desk so I thought I’d fill that with a new (2nd hand) Youkits HB-1B courtesy of Dave (G0AYD) as I love miniature CW transceivers. Here you can […]